4 songs I’ve done recently seem to work together – they’re crunchy with guitars and synth.
I’ve thought of a name and bought a website for them; here is my concept art, hopefully I will have put the website up within the next few days. Yay!

Like this:

OK I am maybe getting a bit obsessed with the paisley now and should stop and read a book or something. You have to admit it’s pretty though. I like a that it’s so organic, and although there are recurring shapes you see in commercial patterns it’s really creative and not at all restrictive – except you have to be neat or it doesn’t work at all..

There was a book called “The Owl Service” by Alan Garner, which I read when I was young and it haunted me. A girl on her own in the attic of a dark house, compulsively tracing the owl patterns on an old plate, waiting for something terrible to happen..

I was feeling creative yesterday – this started off as acrylic painted onto a canvas, with more detail added with inks.

This technique is working well for me – I love the textures you get with acrylic and the way you can almost mould it with a palette knife – but I struggle with control and subtlety as the cheap acrylics I can afford tend to clump and are too bright and plasticcy – it’s very had to get any sort of natural warmth from them.

Using inks on top of the acrylics (a mixture of windsor and newton and quink) is a good way to bring a bit more depth and detali in – you can of course use a really fine brush or dip pen with the inks, and they have a better quality of colour – less “new” looking.

I may have gone a bit overboard with the gold ink, but I wanted my elder god to look shiny!

Like this:

Continuing the theme “people you might see in Luton” is this delightful zombie shopper. You almost certainly will see more than one Zombie Shopper in Luton Mall, formerly known and still fondly referred to as the “Arndale Centre”. For some reason, you’re more likely to encounter a Zombie Shopper when you’re in a rush. You can see the bruises where people have been ramming them with their trolleys to get past.

Ink sketch of horse. I’m experimenting with different types of paper. This is on a pad of treated paper meant for acrylics -it’s pressed with tiny diamond shapes to simulate a canvas; the ink behaves and doesn’t blot everywhere but then you don’t get the awesome marbling effects from it running unchecked. And if you look losely you can still see the tiny diamonds!

Like this:

This was a pencil sketch I did years ago which I found in an old sketchbook and scanned in. I was trying to get the effect of chalk on coloured paper – I colourised the drawing to dark green and used dodge and burn to make shadows and highlights. I really like how it’s turned out.

(This is all done on GIMP, which is open source, ie free – I can’t afford photoshop!)

I finally managed to track down some green Chartreuse. It’s made from a blend of 130 different herbs, once thought to be an “Elixir of long life.” It’s been made by Carthusian monks since 1737 despite war, landslide, and exile. Only two monks know the recipe!

It’s so strong that you can only take a tiny bit on your tongue at a time, and it has five distinct flavours (or so Evelyn Waugh states in Brideshead Revisited).

It’s exactly the same colour as my cat’s eyes.

I am keeping one bottle for a bohemian evening with my great friend of two decades, and singer in my first ever band. We will play guitar on the roof, compose epic poetry, and barricade the hatch so the neighbour can’t make us be quiet!